


The Silver Guillotine

by BadWolf256



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 17:50:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17166509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolf256/pseuds/BadWolf256
Summary: In which, to find the true nature of dæmons, Lyra departs from Pan.A post-canon story set in theHis Dark Materialsuniverse.





	1. Prologue: Dust, and its Patience

It was the most natural day in the world, the day that Lyra found Will. 

But that would be getting ahead of ourselves. And Dust, oh, _Dust_ , is nothing if not patient.


	2. Chapter One: A Jordan Quest

In the Retiring Room of Jordan College, Lyra Asriel threw down her cutlery. It was a fit of unrestrained passion that was rare for the woman who was once a child, and one that did not escape the notice of the ailing Master. 

“Lyra, child,” He spoke, but Lyra would hear nothing of it. What a willful girl she had been, he remembered now. How stubbornly she had resisted his best attempts at saving her. She was, in full, the most ungrateful wretch that he had ever met. Yet even back then there was something of the child that drew them in and implored them hear her, and it was natural that the girl should want to do important work, or at least embark on that grand adventure children so often entertained. And time had changed her, at least. It had made her someone respectable, if a bit too much of herself remained for his liking. 

“I will _not_ abandon my post! It is my life’s work, it is the blood of my veins, you cannot make me!” 

In the lamplight, she looked fierce, as if she had no semblance of the protocol he had breached in allowing her her position, or the blade that would come over his head if anyone found out that he had permitted her inside the Retiring Room. It was not the first time that Lyra had seen the inside of Jordan’s most forbidden study, but she had not told the Master this, and so he considered her as he always had; with a grudging respect that boiled off the utmost top of his loathing, despite his better judgement, and tempered by his affinity for liking the child. 

It wasn’t an affinity that stood above his authority, however, and he tired of the child’s impunity. 

“Sit down.” He commanded, in that tone which only a Master can affect, and which brokered no room for argument. With her eyes blazing, Lyra sat, the set to her chin sharp as her bones. She did give the appearance of an adult. It was a shame, he thought, that it didn’t extend to her nature. Ah, well. He would endeavor to explain it to her as best he could, and hope that she would see the truth of it. 

“You have enjoyed yourself, here at Jordan. My dear, you have excelled at your studies-”

“Don’t call me ‘my dear’.” Lyra hisses, “I’d not be involved with _you._ ” 

“And,” He goes on, as if she had been silent, “Your work has furthered the field of experimental theology exponentially, should it prove to be honest.” 

She seems, then, to muster enough politeness to excuse herself before interrupting, 

“Master, I’ve never spoken a word of falsity in my life since I returned to you. What I said I said because it needed to be, because I know it. I know that it’s true like I know that my dæmon is. Would you look me in the eyes and tell me there are no such things as dæmons, when yours is at this very instant by your side?” 

The Master sighed, long and weary. The child’s education had done little to advance her in maturity, but everything to further her skills of persuasion, and had made her a force to reckon with in intellect as well as manner. If she could but put it to use- but there was no time for this. It was vital, this, and it would not be his failing. 

“Be that as it may,” He said, “Few believe you. Your work here is regarded as brilliant, but it will not get you anywhere, nor does it bear significance on the field.” 

“It is their loss, then.” 

“Yes,” He says, clearing his throat in a long, stuttered cough. Consumption, they said. "It is the determination of myself and my extensive connections at the Magisterium that you would do right to aid them in their undertakings.” 

“Their undertakings, you mean, that led to the organized and purposeful severance of children? If you think that I would ever ‘aid’ in such an effort than you know nothing of me.” 

“I have never known anything of you, child.” The Master snaps, “But you as anyone should know that severance is no longer the Magisterium’s focus. They have accepted sin in the world. They look now for a counterbalance.” 

“Yes,” Lyra says, her face smoothing, as it does so shockingly, to Scholarly elegance, “They believe in a force that negates the effects of Dust in the universe. They posit that this force is what gives each man his soul.” 

“His dæmon, you mean to say.” 

“No.” Says Lyra, tilting her chin in calm defiance. “His soul. Souls take many forms.” 

“Forms,” The Master adds, “Which no longer concern you.” And at this, Lyra’s fingers curled inwards, in that most curious way that they did whensoever those other realms were mentioned. 

“At any rate,” Said Lyra, “There is no such force. I’ve asked the alethiometer, and it said that the Magisterium should abandon the line of inquiry.” 

“The alethiometer is a creature of Dust, child. How are you to know that it speaks not out of fear?” 

Lyra tosses her head back and laughs, 

“The alethiometer,” She says, “A creature? In the same way that consciousness is its own entity, I suppose, but Dust doesn’t operate as you or I might. It’s interests are in preserving sentience. In all other regards it is entirely neutral.” 

“Supposing, then, that this force is harmful to us?” 

And in this moment, Lyra closes down completely, turning from cool to cold, from wild to respected faster than a man’s heart can break. 

“Seeing as it _supposedly_ forms our dæmons, I don’t see how it could be. Now. You said that I would always have a home in Jordan. If you’re rescinding that offer, you might as well tell me. I’ll have my bags packed by morning.” 

“If I were, to where would you go?” 

“I’ve been meaning to take measurements on the Svalbard ice, and the bear king, Iorek Byrnison, we are well acquainted. I could go to the witches, too, as Serafina Pekkala considers me her clan sister, or the gyptians, who did well in raising me more than you stuffy old Scholars. Look around, Master,” She says, spreading wide her arms, “You’ll find there are many who would have me.” 

The Master sees Lyra, then, as he has never seen Lyra. He sees her as an agent of none but the universe, every universe. More Dust, she is, than human. Her mother’s child. God help them all. He can do nothing but offer her that advice which she would have been too young to understand, all those years ago. 

“Lyra,” He says, “Lyra-” 

“Asriel.” 

He nods. Approving of the name. It is good, and right that she should take her father’s name. 

“Lyra Asriel. Whatever you do, make yourself careful, and that dæmon of yours. If it is many who would take you, remember death among them walks.” 

“Not mine.” She says, “Not again.” 

And sooner than he can ask what she means, she stands from the table in one smooth motion. 

“You need make no arrangements for my transportation,” She says, “I’ll depart before the meals at noon. Will you need a letter of resignation?” 

“Whatever from?” 

“My teaching post.” 

“Oh.” He says, surprised that she would consider her students, so unimportant she must see them as, “No, it won’t be necessary.” 

“What will you tell them?” 

“That you are required elsewhere.” 

“Tell them, then. And-” 

“And?” 

“Thank you,” She says. “I’ve not ever told you, but thank you for- for giving me Jordan, all this time. I wish the best for your health and the health of the college.” 

“I’m not going to see you in this lifetime, am I?” Asks the Master, not knowing why he cares. 

“I shouldn’t think so.” Inevitably, “If you would permit me, I could ask the alethiometer.” 

He shakes his head, his distrust of the instrument wide, though he would have no choice but to honor what it says. 

“Suit yourself.” Says Lyra, “Goodbye, to yourself and Jordan.” 

And then she is sweeping out of the room, her cloak wide, her skirts soft and flowing, fulfilling every bit of the potential that fate has grudgingly allotted her. Perhaps, he thinks, he will hear of her someday. Perhaps it was worth it, her sinning. 

Or perhaps he will be dead long ahead of the changes the Rebellion’s wrought. 

It would certainly be less troublesome. 

*

In her quarters in Gabriel’s Quadrangle, Lyra thought over her dinner. 

The Quad, as it was more commonly known, was named for the same Gabriel that had founded Gabriel College, the brother of Jordan's founder. There were rumors that he had been murdered in the Quad, and that most of the Scholars were housed there to scare off the weak ones from Jordan land. Lyra didn’t take stock in the rumors; even if there were ghosts here, which she knew that there weren’t, she wouldn’t be afraid of them. It was rare, these days, for anything to make her fearful. 

But the Master, tonight, had. When he said that she ought to go in for the Magisterium, she felt the guards at Bolvanger putting their hands on Pantalaimon and tearing him away from her, and she heard the slice of the blade coming down, the pure, raw anguish of leaving him on the shore. She would have to tell Pan, she realized with a jolt, but that could come later. She would get her things ready, tonight, and Pan’d not ask questions because he had come to the conclusion, not far past their return, that Lyra would tell him what he needed to know when he needed to know it, just as he would, himself. 

Pan was asleep on her drawers when she unlocked the door to her rooms, and in the naphta light she could see the dips and valleys of his reddened fur. A bit like her temper, Ma Costa had told her, when they reunited, and it drew out a thread of laughter. Pantalaimon always looked the prettiest when he dozed; the most, Lyra thought, like _her_ dæmon. She could see, in these moments, why he’d settled in this form. That it really was the only form he could’ve taken. But he cracked his eyes open and the moment was lost, and Lyra, smiling bitterly, removed the oilskin pouch from underneath her pillow and set herself to twisting the knobs and the dials. Pan wound himself onto her shoulder as she went, his eyes taking in the symbols but not comprehending them; whether or not the Magisterium was right, she could not know, but no dæmon had the power to understand Dust as man or woman. 

When she was done, the needles danced. She followed them. Pan followed her. And she twitched her fingers, mindlessly, in the same pattern, until it was ingrained in her muscles and memory as deeply as soft, boyish lips. She knew what it meant, what it said. She turned to Pantalaimon with a heavy heart. 

“We have to leave, Pan.” 

“Okay,” Her dæmon said to her. 

“We’ve work to do in Geneva.”

Pan was silent, this time. It was the closest he would come to rebuking her. She hated him for that, sometimes; it was a dæmon’s job to set their person right, but maybe he thought she’d had too much pain in her life for that, and in that case, she didn't know if she were angry. 

“The Master reckoned I should go down the Magisterium,” She began, fitfully, “And help them with their inquiries on Light Matter.” 

Pan’s claws began to sink into her arm, and her apologetic wince would not loosen them. 

“I asked,” She said, “Just now, because I told the Master I’d go to the Church over my dead body.” 

“And?” Asked Pan, quietly, somberly, knowing already the answer. 

“The alethiometer says Geneva is my place.” 

She felt it when his marten’s claws drew blood. 

“We can’t.” He said, “Lyra, whatever the alethiometer told you, we can’t. They would take me away from you.” 

“We don’t know.” Said Lyra, “Pan, we don’t know that. Besides, this is the _alethiometer_ , Pan. The alethiometer doesn’t lie.” 

Pan’s fur bristled, his teeth bared. Settling, though barely, he said, 

“We thought all the knife did was cut holes between worlds. Do you honestly think that you could ever hope to know what the alethiometer wants?” 

It wasn’t the mention of Will that hurt her, burned her soul as nothing in her life had. Though it should have, if she were being true. No, it was the ‘you’, the fact that, in this, she honestly was alone. And it was her own Pantalaimon that made her so. 

“You can stay here, if you want,” She said, “But I’m going to Geneva.” 

“You would leave me.” Pan says, a statement. 

“It’s safer anyways, probably. If you’re worried about Intercision, it would be foolish to have you with me.” 

“Are you-” Pan stuttered, tripping over his feet, “Are you not? Worried about Intercision?” 

“No.” Said Lyra. Her voice, though. It sounded too thin. “The alethiometer wouldn’t tell me to do something that would hurt us. I’m sorry, Pan, but it wouldn’t.” 

Pan says, in that same tone of sorrow and no sense, 

“It’s not us I’m worried about.” 

“Who, then?” 

“You won’t want me to say it.” 

Yet. They are one. They know each what is known by the other, no matter who admits it. 

“Serafina and Iorek. Will. It’ll hurt-” 

“This has nothing to do with Will.” Her tone is clipped, short. Isn’t it funny that when she was young, she couldn’t so much as imagine speaking to Pan in such a way. “Leave Will out of this.” 

Pan lithely retreated, just an inch from her. 

“He’s something to do with everything, I think. He was last time.” 

“This isn’t last time, Pan.” She says. It is hurting her, well and truly, to speak of it- of all the days she swore would be forgotten, or at least moved on from. “This isn’t last time at all.” 

“How?” Pan asks, “How is it not?" 

“Because.” Lyra says, “Because there was something to lose, then. And there’s nothing to lose, not anymore. There’s nothing at stake.” 

Pan takes a long, low look at her. 

“We don’t know that, either.” 

And Lyra opens her mouth, shuts it. Clenches her jaw. Clenches her fists. Makes to swing at the wall and reconsiders. She is a blur of motion; bagging the alethiometer and packing it in the pocket of her furs, polishing her sprig of cloud-pine, springy and fresh as the day it was born, collecting the books of symbols and carefully prying off the back-plates with _Property of Jordan College_ neatly labelled in black graphine. Refusing to look at Pan, that fundamental part of herself. She can’t ignore him forever. But she figures it’s warranted, these minutes that make up for those days, when he swanned off with Kirjava to Authority knows where that he still won’t tell her. She hopes it hurts him as much as it hurts her, the awful things he’s said. She thinks that it must, and it’s that what makes her weep into his auburn fur when she’s sick and tired of it; no, _because_ she’s sick and tired of it, the weight of all these worlds on her shoulders. 

In spite of it, her crying ceases like summer rain, and she knows it’s time to stand. To finish deciding what’s worth bringing with her or not, and pretending like Pan isn’t a factor in that decision. She wipes the tears off her face with the back of a hand. 

“Pan.” She says. “I have to go to Geneva.” 

“Yes.” Pan says, “You do.” 

“How long have you known?” 

“A month or so. The Master spoke to me.” 

“Well.” Says Lyra, “Well. Thanks for telling me.” 

It is Pan, not her, that’s at a loss for words. She wishes he would speak to her. She wishes she would speak to him. They don't. 

Sleep, though. Sleep is what they’ll do, since everything's gone from them but the silence. Sleep, though, is fitful, jolting between one perspective and the next with no concern for feelings. She dreams of Roger if Roger were Will, and stuck down there, in that land so grayly devoid. She dreams of what Will could have done to her, if they’d been but a few years older. That’s the one she hates the most; for her dreams have no business stealing from them what they should’ve had, not the way the universe had. In the dawn hours she dreams of her mother and her father, except something’s wrong with them. They’re happy, and there is no Lyra to cleave them as Intercision would a child’s dæmon. She is sure that they would have been happy without her, has been sure of it since near she stepped once more to the halls of Jordan, but it is harder to witness it intimately. 

To realize that the version of her mother she could have loved is the version of her mother that wasn’t one. 

She wakes up, sweating and trembling and cold, when the _mulefa_ Atal drains Mary Malone of her Dust-gold blood. The window is thrown to the courtyard of the Quad; Pan’s out, she thinks, gone. He’ll not come to see her off. Lyra squares herself against it, hefting her trunk and fastening the clasps of her furs and her traveling cloak, mounting her cloud-pine, tuning herself. Cloud-pine, Serafina explained to her, was a bit like the alethiometer, so Lyra determined that it was the manner in which Dust revealed itself to witches. She had not, as of yet, worked out how it did so to the bears, though she suspected that the act of forging their armor was the integral mechanism. She should have liked, ahead of hearing of Geneva- and was it only yesterday, in reality, that she had heard of Geneva, and cast off dearest Pan?- to journey to the ice. Iorek would have received her, welcomed her if she were lucky, though she was far from the Lyra Silvertongue of her childhood. 

Pan’s choice, however, complicated the situation. The bears had no dæmons, yet they were wary of others who didn’t, especially as Lyra was no witch. It would be tougher, too, to accomplish that curious task she was being set to at Geneva, when dæmonless in the presence of Authority-fearing men. 

But that bridge she would cross at reaching. 

The speculation was distracting her from her aim of flying; and crashing wasn’t something she could afford. There was seldom that could be done to slow or prevent a crash once it started. She would not risk her life for feelings. Experience cautioned her otherwise. She gave herself, instead, the luxury of a final thought as she kicked off from her room in the Quad, through her window and high above the geometric amalgamations of her college. And the thought was this: 

It was lover’s ghosts that haunted Gabriel’s Quadrangle, and like lovers, they too would fade. 

*

Up, inside the clouds, cold dew tickled at the skin that poked out of her fox-furs. Lyra’s trunk was a constant resistance that sought to drag her downwards, but her determination was a stronger beast, and bore her aloft through perspiration, through storms and sun alike. A day passed, and then another, Lyra attentive on her cloud-pine. It wasn’t the longest she had held Dust as her equal; it was nowhere near that long, and she would rather die than test the record, but it robbed her of her strength nonetheless, and she knew that she would have to stop soon, to nourish her body that her body might nourish her mind, and to get gossip from the townspeople, if they weren’t too afraid. 

Apart from this logistical pondering, Lyra flew mindlessly. There wasn’t room to hold more in her mind than the connection. Blessedly, she was free from the ravaging Will-shaped hole in her heart, but when she landed, on the fourth day, it flooded her; this, and a worry for her poor Pan that drove her to sickness, her Pan that she hadn’t said goodbye to, nor promised to find, afterwards. There was only one thing for it, to hop on the cloud-pine and devote herself to the journey. 

This, though, would have to wait. 

There was food, to begin with; she took a roll of crusty bread and blackened, salted fish from a wharfsman, explaining in the softest voice she could that her dæmon was a dragonfly and resting in her pocket. It was a horrible way to go about it; to Lyra’s ears, Marisa Coulter spoke. What her appetite was shrunk; the food was forced down her throat as a means of survival, to give her the strength to keep going, though by now yet more horrors had wrested themselves out of the gate behind which they’d been locked, for Lyra would be shocked if the Magisterium _didn’t_ speak to her on her mother’s work, and appraise her of all the awful tortures that she had subjected men and women and witches to at the experiments around which was founded Bolvanger. 

And Pantalaimon-

No sooner did Lyra spare a moment for Pantalaimon, for Bolvanger, for Will, than she was knocked off her feet and into the frigid, icy water, moving fast with the Northern current.


End file.
